6:30 p.m. Sunday night, total darkness thanks to Daylight Savings ending that very day.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in October my wife Anne and I traveled from Indianapolis to Cincinnati for a live Q&A with TV’s Admiral Picard himself, Sir Patrick Stewart. The 83-year-old Shakespearean thespian and erstwhile starship captain had a new book to sell and thousands of fans to enthrall.

Speaking of American stage appearances by octogenarian Englishmen who costarred in a few landmark TV shows and some notable films, whose tours forbid the taking of photos or video, who’ve been married a few times and whose current wives are over thirty years younger than they are…now for something completely different!

Dateline: Sunday, November 5, 2023 – We didn’t have to leave town to attend “An Evening with the Late John Cleese”, held at the Murat Theatre at the Old National Centre — the same venue where I’d previously caught performances by Bob Newhart, Henry Rollins, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and the Whose Line Is It, Anyway? tour. The celebrated member of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus troupe, the star of the brilliantly awkward sitcom Fawlty Towers, the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter (and costar) of A Fish Called Wanda, and the most pompous Hpgwarts ghost from the Harry Potter movies has made no secret that with three ex-wives to his credit, he is officially not wealthy to this day and remains available for paying gigs such as this very occasion.

We arrived at 6:30 just as the doors were about to open. While we waited, a representative came down the line and offered $20 upgrades to VIP status, which would provide slightly better seats and access to a “VIP lounge” where we could presumably mingle with strangers and sit in slightly different chairs for a few minutes before resigning ourselves to the cramped, old-fashioned seats in their theater. We were surprised the VIP passes hadn’t sold out, but declined the offer. Inside, the merchandise stand sold only two items: $35 T-shirts with Cleese’s grayed silhouette on one side, and $100 autographed event posters. We declined these as well, because there are some instances in which we’re only willing to indulge so far. I later overheard the lady sitting next to me claim those two whole items soon sold out.

Attendees were invited to submit questions in the lobby in advance, though few were ultimately used in the show.

We took our seats shortly before 7. The digital tickets stated a 7:30 start time, but a standee in the lobby said 8:00. Either way, we settled in and appreciated our delightfully unobstructed view of the stage across three rows of empty seats in front of us, which could have been ours for a few dollars more. At 7:35, out came the opening act who hadn’t been named on the bill — standup comedian Camilla Cleese, daughter of John, who surely underwent a thorough auditioning process to win this coveted gig over other applicants.

I haven’t kept up with the standup world pretty much since George Carlin’s twilight years (apart from John Mulaney’s oeuvre) and can’t speak to how her material stacks up against current practitioners. Like her father’s works, her barbs skewed dark-humored at times; punchlines were more hit than miss. Subjects included how her height vexes others (she’s 6-foot-1), the post-COVID dating world, and her most recent stepmother, who’s extremely close in age to her older sister/John’s eldest daughter Cynthia. (“We got a new middle child in the family.”) Fun trivia: Cleese’s wife is seven years older than Patrick Stewart’s.

At 7:52 she introduced her father (“You know him as the star of Pink Panther 2!”), who replaced her on stage and had a chair waiting for him, next to a small table with lit candle and glass of clear fluid. He thanked us all for welcoming him to “the outskirts of northern Kentucky”, an amuse-bouche of yuks to come that earned him a round of good-natured booing.

Dressed as comfortably as Patrick Stewart had been (and with similar loafers, in white rather than pink), Cleese held court on what he likes to call “naughty” humor, very much the Monty Python stock-in-trade, and the use of “taboo subjects” as punchlines, which gets tougher to sort as societal sects grow increasingly humorless in decreeing what can or cannot be mocked, based on the inherent assumption that they rule the world and can exert such controls. He tried to distinguish between “affectionate teasing” and “nasty teasing”, but the two moments in which he cited the example of “the extreme woke” as comedy gatekeepers may in turn have gatekept some listeners from that particular semantic path. Another, tinier audience minority may have cheered a little too loudly at the label’s invocation.

To the Extremely Online, who willingly immerse themselves in such environments every day, his “affectionate teasing”/”nasty teasing” dichotomy may feel imperceptible or even bogus. Such environments shouldn’t have to be that way, ruled as they frequently are by domineering frat-boys of all political stripes who think every encounter between two or more humans deserves to be held with all the decorum of a drunken barroom brawl. But here we are and here they rot. As a fat four-eyed cishet white male Christian Hoosier anti-partisan quasi-centrist comics-collecting pretentious introverted bumpkin geek blogger over 50 who grew up poor and basically fatherless and didn’t date till I was 19…I’m familiar with how it feels to be insulted, both as an individual and as an involuntary category member. I can sense the dichotomy a little more firmly now than when I was 13 and a bit more prone to tears. It took a while to develop the tools to cope and/or exit for someplace better. But that’s just me. Then again, I don’t hold sway over crowds.

That said…as Camilla pointed out, he’s of Monty Python. Offense was kind of their thing.

Some of his jokes were met with awkward silences, at which he cackled whenever he’d anticipated that response. The theater held its collective breath when he brought up the subject of “racial jokes”…only to exhale when the next few old-fashioned minutes were devoted to mocking various specific European nations — the Greek, the Swiss, the Scottish, etc. It’s a familiar construct to fellow Gen X-ers who grew up on those sad 1970s “Polack” jokes (a forefather of the 1980s “dumb blonde” jokes). As one might expect from an elder Englishman, the French were of course a prime target. (Why do the French have so many civil wars? So they can win one once in a while. How do you defend Paris from an advancing army? They don’t know, it’s never been tried.) The closest he came to anything “racial” was a pair of hoary Jewish jokes, one of which he said was given to him by his Jewish ex-son-in-law, screenwriter Ed Solomon. (I’d just encountered the same joke the other day on Twitter, minus the “Jewish” part.)

The audience wasn’t 100% white, for what that’s worth, but were overwhelmingly gray-haired, as Camilla noted more than once from the stage. The evening’s loudest heckler protested his slagging of Cleveland, which he called “a dump” and wondered aloud how anyone could live there willingly without armed guards keeping them in.

As a sort of olive branch proffered across the ever-widening generation gap, a surprising number of minutes in the show were devoted to showing clips of fun moments from Cleese’s storied past, which filled time and let him continue resting. Samples included:

• “The Fish Slapping Dance”
• “The Queen Victoria Handicap”
• The Mr. Creosote sketch from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
• The Black Knight duel from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• A montage of the Yorkshire terriers that Michael Palin’s bumbling assassin slaughters in A Fish Called Wanda

Cleese paid tribute to Graham Chapman, his longtime castmate and dear friend who died in 1989 at 48, with a clip from the eulogy he delivered at Chapman’s televised service, which of course included moments that pushed back against what the deceased often rejected as “mindless good taste”. Complementing this was a short, bawdy anecdote involving rude misuse of a gin-‘n’-tonic. Still another Chapman story would come later in the night, regarding a complication in the Python cast’s visit to Dachau.

At 8:30, less than an hour in, Cleese announced a 20-minute intermission so he could go rest or whatever. He’s a year older than Patrick Stewart and had dealt with more than his share of health issues, such as pre-cancerous growth removals and so forth. It’s one of the differences no one ever complains about between live theater and today’s double-feature-length movies.

The closest we came to getting a photo of our special guest. We gotta be us.

At 8:50 the Cleeses retook the stage, both seated. Camilla (“my saber-toothed daughter”) held the contents of the audience question-boxes. To their surprise, none of us asked about African or European swallows. Cleese the Elder digressed frequently, ruminating on fans with “Don’t mention the war” tattoos, the upside of cannibalism, this one time in Hong Kong when he was fed poodle, Camilla’s two adorable rescue dogs (he finds it much harder grieving dead pets than dead friends), that time a Danish dentist laughed at A Fish Called Wanda so hard that he died in the theater (and later had a comedy festival named after him), his lifelong love of cheese, the fact that his family’s original name was Cheese, and this other time a UK cab driver mistook him for George Clooney. Nobody had asked about any of this. But he is 84, so.

The two of them also recounted memorable audience questions from past shows, such as “Did the Queen kill Diana?” (clearly an armchair detective barking in the wrong forest) and “If you were an aircraft component part, which would you be?” (a joystick, of course) and “Does Marjorie Taylor Greene weigh more than a duck?” Upon that last one, a few minutes’ mandatory mockery of terrible 2020s Republican politicians ensued. (I’m not sure either of them pronounced “Boebert” correctly. Not that she’s earned the courtesy of accuracy.) Cleese conceded this bit was a fish-in-a-barrel exercise: “It’s very difficult being a comedian these days. They’re doing it for us.”)

Topics actually brought up by the Indianapolis audience:

• How George Harrison personally financed Monty Python’s Life of Brian after reading the screenplay and deciding he really wanted to watch that movie
• “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?” (His answer: “What question do you wish you’d been asked that you’ve never been asked?”)
• When asked to recount a prank played on a Python member, he told us about a phone call to Michael Palin — who was in Helsinki filming one of his numerous, straight-faced travel specials — during which he pretended to be a documentarian.

…honestly, I think that was about it. At one point Camilla dropped all the cards on the floor while Dad was talking, but it didn’t seem like rehearsed slapstick.

Our time with the Cleeses concluded at 9:34, but not before entertaining us with one last archival clip to round out the clipfest. The five surviving Pythons appeared at the 1998 Aspen Comedy Festival to be interviewed by fellow comedian Robert Klein. For the sake of making the reunion as complete as possible, the quintet brought along the jarred ashes of the aforementioned, departed Mr. Chapman, who in spirit managed to steal the scene from beyond the grave. It was incontrovertibly our audience’s biggest laugh of the evening. Well, that and the French jokes, which might not have endeared him to Jean-Luc Picard.